Infrastructural peripheries in the city-region: Airport spatial influences

The decline of Fordist urbanity that coincides with the failed industrial metropolitanism of the seventies had promoted a regional reformism to observe and manage the role and reality of regional peripheries. Today there are large areas that could be considered both reminiscent of the countryside or as a dissemination of urban settlements. These spaces have a strong territorial diversity of types of regional scales (historic cities, new cities, suburbs, agricultural areas, natural systems or infrastructures) and constitute the essence of the city-region. Qualities such as functional hybridity, territorial isotropy, and polycentrism, define the territorial organization of these regional fragments.
Within this reality, infrastructures have become integrated capital in the city-region, as they are necessary elements for global competition based on connectivity and regional performance. Airport infrastructures, understood as transport hubs that create great flows, are consolidating themselves into tertiary programmatic poles of great influence on the regional socio-economic map and territorial organization.
Supported by the observation of international airport case studies and their adjacent territorial fragments (e.g. infrastructure size and management, programmatic layout of the built and un-built territory, and local and global connectivity), the investigation studies the role of the airport infrastructure as a trigger of particular peripheral territorial realities and as a key regional component to address a strategic and contextual localism that could influence the region performance and its ecological impact.